Visual experience as an activity of thought and knowledge
VISUAL EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTIVITY OF THOUGHT AND KNOWLEDGE
DEBATE MEETING
WITH EXHIBITION OF CHILDREN’S WORKS
at the conclusion of a graphic-pictorial experience
conducted with children aged 6 to 11
at the Monteveglio elementary school
Year 1976-1977
PARTICIPANTS IN THE MEETING
The Painter Bruno Pinto who conducted this experience
The Teachers of the elementary school
Dr. Benedetta Davalli, Psychologist (Bologna)
Prof. Giuseppe Ricci, Child Neuropsychiatrist (Rome)
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Publication in SAGITTARIA, Organic education through art
cultural review of the Centro Iniziative Culturali di Pordenone No. 76, 1978
editor-in-chief Luciano Padovese
This meeting is intended to be a conversation about the experience carried out at the Monteveglio elementary schools, which began with the invitation extended to me to teach children graphic-pictorial techniques useful for their expressive needs.
Which techniques are suited to the expressive needs of the child?
What is Childhood Expression?
Childhood drawing is the expression of a particular state of existence; what are the ways to organically develop the potential contained within it?
It immediately became evident that it was not a matter of finding a didactic and a pedagogy of art for elementary school children, but of understanding the function of the aesthetic experience as an experience of a particular mode of knowledge within the framework of general pedagogy and didactics.
Childhood figurative expression is a heterogeneous bundle of expressive elements, symptomatic in nature, of a fluid existential situation. Therefore, the problem that arises is to understand which aesthetic behaviors the child should practice in order to evolve from psychological weaknesses, mental deficiencies, clichés, and compulsions, and gradually acquire a truly autonomous consciousness.
In the very brief experience (about 25 hours per class), it seemed evident to us that, in general, current school education excludes and rejects the exercise of those human faculties proper to the development of creative intelligence.
An attempt was therefore made to induce the child to an exercise of figurative space less preoccupied with schematic symbolic representations, less abstractly projective and conditioned by visual clichés, and to induce them to an action in which they felt globally engaged beyond any abstract justification.
In this attempt, situations emerged that seemed to deserve more careful observation and definition, as they could constitute a starting point for developing a deeper receptivity in the child and a more autonomous and original expressive consciousness regarding their usual existential space.
(Bruno Pinto)
Through the graphic-pictorial experience conducted in our school with the intervention of Mr. Pinto as a specialist in the field, we had the opportunity to introduce our students to a singular experience; it led them toward forms of expression in which spontaneity and the spirit of creation found their highest and most significant manifestation.
Through imaginative drawing, free from conventional patterns and from forms that are merely imitative or representative of reality, every child found a way to express their own inner world, joys, hopes, and frustrations.
Drawing understood, that is, above all as a liberating act, constituted the focal point of the experience, and it is precisely in this sense that any person with a minimum of artistic sensitivity understands the deepest value of the activity itself.
The teacher, through drawing, is psychologically aided in knowing the student, and the latter learns to observe. The lesson was therefore set on a very particular psychological level: each of us is very sensitive (and the child especially so) to their mode of expression; therefore, it was necessary here, perhaps more than in other lessons, to apply the principle of collaboration whereby the teacher becomes a companion in a research that is as fun as it is exhilarating. Children, in fact, enjoy (scribbling) very much; it lies in the teacher’s psychological shrewdness more than anything else, and also in their artistic sensitivity, to transform the scribble into something that has meaning in the moral and psychic development of the child.
Through the search for motifs and forms that may have references to reality in imaginative drawings composed of lines and marks that seem completely incomprehensible, these children were invited to reflect, to reason, and to realize the multiplicity of forms of expression, while their imagination was also continually stimulated, along with feeling and imagery. Thus, the individual characters of each child’s personality emerged, and in the cases of children presenting particular problems, this favored an increasingly deep and detailed knowledge of their most intimate needs. Group work, included alongside individual activities, contributed to making those forms of socialization that the school promotes today increasingly significant.
For education in aesthetic taste, introduced as a moment of observation and an attempt at critical analysis, the discussion of knowing how to “look” at works of art was initiated, both the fruit of the imagination of geniuses and those productions that the children themselves developed. Comparisons, differentiations, and analogies, initially always considered too difficult, gradually became easier because they were sought together, studied with increasingly careful analysis and increasingly open visions.
The discussion thus initiated, full of certainly interesting problems and developments, has opened new issues and new horizons worthy of being explored; not neglecting, therefore, those requirements of an organizational and practical nature, but rather strengthening and enriching everything concerning the structural and also material part of the work itself, I consider it more than useful and constructive to continue the experience with the more direct involvement of parents, school operators, and naturally administrators.
(Santi, 3rd-grade teacher)
Painting was for these children only illustration, representation, reproduction, or at most imagination: the transition from these forms to non-figurative, non-objective ones, the replacement of “concrete” with “abstract,” intends to affirm that every reproduction or interpretation of external reality is illusory and therefore abstract, while the form created by the artist, independent of nature, is the creation of a new, concrete reality: all this is as difficult as all new discourses, full of clashes and comparisons, but all constructive and formative.
The finding of familiar things like a tree, a house, or a street in a tangle of lines was experienced intensely by these children, who immediately discovered the movement of these apparently static objects and, with movement, the thought and life of everything that seemed inert to them. The painting, at times, would resolve into a set of vibrations generating luminous and real movements acting on the eye in a manner analogous to a cinematographic projection.
Thus, the study of color contrast, the differentiation of identical colors: bright red, matte red, and so on; the sensation given by brightness and vividness compared to opacity: vivid, glossy colors take hold, they stand out from the page: colors become our objects, things, and feelings. I say feelings because I remember a phrase that the painter Licini wrote polemically against “Salon critics” in a letter to friends before one of his solo exhibitions at the Galleria del Milione: “we will demonstrate that geometry can become feeling.” I then spoke of traumas and, in saying this, I was referring to the reactions of some of my students to an apparent violence suffered due to the deformation of one of their works by a sudden and, again according to them, arbitrary correction. These acts of violence contrasted with the educational system they knew, but later the reasons for the “teacher’s” intrusion were penetrated, fully understood, and I would say justified. These interventions could be considered positive in that they definitively destroyed their “conformism,” even if a new type was born, in a certain sense.
At the end of these fruitful lessons, we were able to observe greater mental openness, the deepening of reasoning, the vividness of observation, the enrichment of imagination, and so on, until reaching a very high goal: that of being able to arrive at a universal language free from any “rational” tradition. This goal alone can tell us how relevant this type of “artistic education” is, aimed at truly uniting various opinions, traditions, and civilizations into a single discourse without borders and without discrimination of race or color.
(Caprara, 4th-grade teacher)
The peculiarity of these pages drawn by elementary school children, and so precisely analyzed and presented by Pinto, deserves a careful and accurate description, at least to favor the understanding of the underlying process.
It should be clarified immediately that the experience, as such, is and remains unique, not only because we believe it has not yet been repeated by anyone, but also because it departs from normal texts or the usual considerations on childhood drawing, whether as representation or as a ‘free’ and expressive activity.
In undertaking the experience, Bruno Pinto did not intend then, nor does he now, to apply any model, even those more recent ones suggested or experimented with by contemporary pedagogues.
And those who, like the undersigned, have known Pinto for years and followed the experience, can state with complete confidence that there exists in Bruno a psychic desire so deep to discover the child’s world of colors, their descriptive and articulatory capacity of space and time, almost without considering the age factor.
In short, it was a matter of going back to find, and perhaps, why not, to rediscover those aspects so vivid and vital that the ‘dead child’ of his article hid or, better yet, concealed.
This first aspect defines an important condition for us, which is nothing other than the emotional and human relationship established by Bruno with these children, sometimes attentive, other times amazed or even intimidated by this ‘pictorial mystery.’
I wrote emotional and human relationship, as this is the trait and the way in which Bruno approached children aged six to eleven. The ‘true’ way of a painter who has a single problem: to know in order to discover novelties that give pleasure to the eyes, to the non-form, to the possibility of discovering something that is inside, no matter how much it may be repressed.
From this, an adult-child relationship is born that has nothing scholastically rational about it, but presents and develops itself in all its richness of discovering together, studying with effort the lines and colors, since the whole mixture is a product of what one feels and what one has thought.
It is not just an experience, psychoanalytically speaking; it is a comprehensive product of intelligence and feeling, physical senses included.
But how can all this be defined with more clarity and precision if not as ‘making painting together’ with children who not only do not know it, but have never thought of it, let alone ‘done’ it.
And Bruno accomplished this, making available his experience of painting, not as belonging to a pictorial school, but as a ‘doer’ or protagonist of painting.
It lies in this exceptionality: the non-scholastic relationship within the walls of a new school, that of Monteveglio, which is also a full-time school.
These are two external, let us say objective, conditions that might have very little impact or meaning in the individual drawings of the children, but we believe they nonetheless had their relevance in both favoring and contrasting, in any case in making this anomalous experience live for a few months.
I defined it as an anomalous experience because it seems to me that having discussed it with the children and parents of Monteveglio was not sufficient to make it known to those who might be interested in it. In fact, only if others take ownership of this experience, using it as a point of reference, will it become less and less anomalous and more and more a source for knowing the graphic-pictorial activities of the ‘little ones.’
I believe, in fact, that in such cases a text can transform into a vehicle of communication and, above all, that it can perform a function: to intelligently spread activity of this kind, concretely favoring the development of creativity, and not only in children.
Looking at the drawings that were produced over time, I always had the clarity that the categories or rather the modalities of usual psychology were not usable in any way, both because of the forms that were too ‘abstract,’ one might say, and because of the plasticity of the drawings, even when Bruno defines them in his comments as rigid or compressed, and also because of the peculiarity of the way of coloring.
Although observing the drawings one recognizes Pinto’s imprint, it must be specified that only this is present, and what is it then if not the presence of an adult who knows how to make painting, and in practice an imprint of someone who has performed the function of a Master.
I have already written that traditional psychological modalities do not seem to me to help in understanding these drawings, so simple in their material (paper and colors), but so rich and complex in their expression.
It seems, in fact, that space is used by children in a very ‘different’ function from what the school does, or any person with a pedagogical function would do; it is not used to organize, but either to move or to try to stir what has long been deposited within us, in children, in their eyes, even in their thoughts. There is nothing to organize (Pinto says, concrete objects are not made), but it is necessary to concentrate (this is the great request made of the children-students and pedagogically very productive) and to feel not only what one experiences, but also to intuit how it could be represented, ‘seeing’ what one imagines.
Obviously, this is not the imagination of a cartoon, nor is it fantasy; rather, it is only and exclusively a complex act circumscribed internally to a person, a complex act that with thought, movement, paper, and colors takes form or transforms into something communicable to those beside you.
It is evident that it is not possible to realize such a condition in the child unless they are also taught, in other words, unless they are provided with the tools and conditions so that they themselves can then give or make, first of all, “something” of their “own.” This is what I understood to be Bruno’s effort during the months spent on this work.
Since there is no already known answer or already experimented condition to such an extent, and the children posed real problems to Pinto, which he himself had faced. Perhaps something similar could happen to us as well, should we live the conditions described, or in any case, certainly those who deal with the subject would well feel what to say or converse about in this regard.
But the children of Monteveglio discovered in making painting a space previously unknown to them; they colored objects, forms, and perhaps even thoughts and sensations with ‘their’ colors, that is to say, ‘recognized’ by them.
Thus, in fact, a sort of mental work proceeds with eyes closed at times, and eyes open at others, to reconstruct and express what was inside and is no longer outside or vice versa, what had been outside for a long time, but one did not know how to see, so much so as to believe it almost did not exist.
This is why these drawings cannot be looked at with psychological modalities, whether they be those of Piaget or Corman or anyone else, because a fusion has been operated between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ through the work ‘of the man and the children.’
What to say then if not to express the wish that the psychoanalytic approach might transform into an opportunity to ‘re-examine’ these drawings as well; and now I express all the pleasure in seeing these images that communicate journeys, feelings, gazes, and observations of children who are alive, lively, thoughtful, and intelligent, but above all of ordinary children, children of ordinary people, almost as in an ordinary fairy tale by that great ordinary man, Gianni Rodari.
(Benedetta Davalli)
